day no. 17,221: welcoming strangers without succumbing to strange ways

"We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.” — Hilaire Belloc

You get what you tolerate. What you tolerate eventually gains enough traction to become something you must accept. If you, in an effort to be hospitable, allow for differences of opinion at your table, you may convince some guests of the superiority of your position. But if you, in an effort to be open-minded, require differences of opinion at your table, you will lose the ability to invite anyone over because the lunatics will run the asylum. In similar fashion, if you take in refugees looking to leave their oppressive homelands behind, you may win them to the value of your land that was able to offer solace, but if you take in refugees looking to make conquest of your homeland, you will find out that can no offer asylum to any because your land is run by lunatics.

"We are indignant at the thought that our fathers, long since gone from the scene, could possibly have any kind of authority over us. We want to think that the placement of individuals in history is nothing more than a random number sequence, with no authority given to those who came before. But the Lord of all history placed them there, with the command that they leave an inheritance to us. Our duty is to receive that inheritance, build upon it, and become in turn a blessing to our covenantal grandchildren." — Douglas Wilson, Angels in the Architecture: A Protestant Vision for Middle Earth

We dishonor our fathers by allowing their names and ways to be disregarded by other people's children. We do no justice to our ancestors by giving other people's descendants the right to disregard them in our own backyards.

"No one should ever be allowed to tear down any fence unless they could explain why it had been erected in the first place." — G.K. Chesterton

Immigration is only wise when assimilation is a stated goal. If it is not, it is simply a matter of how much salt can be added to the sugar bowl until it is no longer a sugar bowl.

“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.” — G.K. Chesterton

Before we begin trying to give undocumented aliens the ability to vote in our elections, we should give our documented ancestors the ability to vote in our elections. The world they built for us should count for something. In order to preserve what they provided to us, we must remember how they built it. Why are some so eager to allow guests to vote on the menu? If we are having people over, we can give thought to the preferences and allergies of our guests, of course, but it would not be reasonable to think that we had to change the menu after the guests have left or even worse, because the guests would not go home or stay by conforming to the menu of the home in which they sought comfort.

"People who take no pride in the noble achievements of remote ancestors will never achieve 

anything worthy to be remembered with pride by remote descendants." — T.B. Macaulay

Those who ignore the past are not only doomed to repeat it, they are doomed to be despised by their descendants.  

"People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors." — Edmund Burke

Those who make a habit out of rejecting their grandfathers will be rejected by their grandchildren.

"Tradition is not the worship of ashes but the preservation of fire." — Gustav Mahler

If we want to preserve the West, and we should, we will have to keep the fire of our fathers going. This means welcoming strangers without succumbing to strange ways.